Talking, teaching, documenting. Using mobile tools, consulting & running workshops on digital storytelling..
I have been using the Solarmonkey Adventurer for around six months now. It normally sits in my office window charging and is often grabbed to take out with me to top up the battery on my iPhone 5 and iPad Mini. I have also been known to hang it in the window on a long haul flight […]
While documenting trucks of aid passing through the border into Syria we get a call and permission had been granted to visit Killis Camp. This kind of access is rare so instead of heading straight into Syria we travelled back a few hundred yards to the camps front gates. We are guided in and told […]
Up and out by 6:30am. Heading to the airport. Once out of Gaziantep the roads were empty. For the first time in a week I dipped into the feeds. The more I read the more the refugee crisis in Syria felt like a bad dream. On Twitter It seems everyone back home is going crazy […]
The service taxi – a kind of small minibus used throughout Syria in place of public transport – was not being driven in a way its designers intended. The dirt road through Aleppo provence in northern Syria was, itself, dangerous enough for me to look at my white knuckles on the back of the driver’s […]
The walk through no man’s land at the Killis/Azaz border crossing had me blinking through sweat at my dusty surroundings. We had just watched the Hayat Convoy for Syria successfully pass through, laden with aid not bound for Damacus, but heading to be distributed from Azaz. We were in Free Syria now – as opposed […]
While the world’s news is again preoccupied with North Korea, confirmation is seeping out of Washington that Assad has in fact used sarin gas on suburbs of Damascus and elsewhere, in what it calls a “small scale” chemical weapons attack. I’m not sure if 20+ people killed by chemical weapons would be considered “small” if […]
Since the early 90′s I have always carried some form of water purification when travelling. This stems from nearly dying of Amoebic Dysentery in India. Not long after that adventure I found myself responsible for 18 travellers and myself as I would tour around Lake Victoria in Africa. The route would take us from Kenya, […]
The future of Audioboo is uncertain. Like most online spaces. But Audioboo isn’t like most online spaces. This page of blurted sentiment and opinion will probably seem a bit much to some. Perhaps I’m over reacting because something I deeply care about is threatened. I first blogged about Audioboo four years ago, not long after it’s launch. I […]
I have a selection of supports for my camera gear. All shapes and sizes, for all kinds of uses. Tripods that rarely see the light of day, monopods that for some reason have three legs but are still called monopods and those overpriced pocketable types with the flexible legs that flex to pieces. I wanted […]
The internet doesn’t really have a beginning or an end. It’s a system. Still, I liked the title and parking my motorbike on a beach in New Zealand last week, I saw a sign that reminded me that many communication cables do in fact stop at New Zealand. It takes a lot for me to […]
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There is mystery in her gaze. I never know what she’s thinking. She’s two and a half going on thirteen. Funny, curious, chatty.
I have no recollection of that age. I once saw some over saturated cine film, shot on a Welsh farm. Dungarees peeled down, I was peeing on a beehive.
My first memory resides six months later at three years old.
There are few witnesses left to tell me about that time.
My daughter will to be able to look back at a trail of digital breadcrumbs. Audio, video, photos, text. She’ll certainly get a glimpse of who she was. But there will always be mystery.
Alan WattsAdvice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer.
Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon.
Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say.
Write like you’re a bird flying over us & can see everything, & please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves.
Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone.
Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.
